In 1972, at the age of ten, I spent a week somewhere near Windsor – it’s hazy now – learning how to program a computer. This involved writing out instructions by hand and sending the pages to unseen technicians who converted them into stacks of cards punched with holes. The cards were fed overnight into a device that we were only once taken to see. It filled a room; magnetic tape spooled behind glass panels in big, grey, wardrobe-sized boxes. The next morning, we’d receive a printout of the results and the day would be spent finding the programming faults that had derailed our calculations of pi to the nth decimal place.
There was awed talk of computer experts who worked at an even rawer level of abstraction, compiling programs (no one called it coding then) in the opaque, hieroglyphic notation of “machine code”. Those were the days when you had to work close to the guts of the machine: you thought in terms of central processing units, circuit diagrams, binary logic. If you wanted to play games, you had to write them yourself – by the 1980s, on a BBC Micro or Sinclair ZX Spectrum with less graphical sophistication than an ATM.
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